The Guardian today reported on Facebook’s scandalous manipulation of hundreds of thousands of users’ emotions as part of an experiment. Needless to say, there has been an uproar – and rightly so. Just the lack of informed consent – or is that in the small print somewhere? – makes the flesh crawl.

It would be interesting to know how they measured the emotions they manipulated – entirely by the ‘how are you feeling’ function of a status update or by something more subtle? Will the results eventually be published? Will those people so manipulated be, after the fact, informed of their participation.

Another salient point, I think, is that this kind of experiment is entirely unnecessary – countless prior experiments into emotional contagion have been undertaken and, while certainly not in this medium or on this scale, the results are, predictably, the same.